|
CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
Heidi Grant Murphy Kevin Murphy
February 6, 2007
|
What Works, and What Doesn't By Michelle Dulak Thomson
It's an unusual four-work program that can be rearranged as comprehensively as was the St. Lawrence Quartet's last Tuesday evening. The printed program for the Herbst Theatre recital (presented by San Francisco Performances) put Haydn's Quartet Op. 77, No. 1, and Ernest Chausson's Chanson perpetuelle on the first half, with Roberto Sierra's Songs From the Diaspora and Shostakovich's Fifth Quartet following intermission.
Even that seems to have been a second thought. St. Lawrence first violinist Geoff Nuttall, in explaining the change of order, mentioned that the Sierra was originally in the traditional spot for an untried new work (in the first half, just before intermission, so as to prevent listeners from bailing out without hearing it). In the event, the order was Chausson, Shostakovich, intermission, Haydn, Sierra — an arrangement that proved to serve all four pieces well.
Putting the Chausson first, for example, allowed the St. Lawrence to show off from the first a rich, dark, velvety quartet sound that the rest of the program gave it scant opportunities to use. It also gave the audience a taste of the quartet's guests, soprano Heidi Grant Murphy and pianist Kevin Murphy, that whetted the appetite for more. When last I heard the singer, she had an attractive but feather-light voice. Yet on Tuesday she had ample resources for the Chanson perpetuelle, the lusciously harmonized, agonizingly observed soliloquy of a forsaken woman about to drown herself.
The Shostakovich that followed was probably better off here than, as originally planned, at the end of the program. It has one of the composer's curiously inconclusive quartet finales in which a slow, quiet reminiscence of the originally boisterous finale theme is evidently meant to provide a sort of resolution. It doesn't work here any better than it does in the Third Quartet (the other obvious instance), and as an end to an entire program it couldn't help but be a letdown.
But the Fifth has other difficulties. Some of the composer's quartets are so designed that, in one way or another, they are fail-safe music if tolerably well played. The brief, meticulously constructed Seventh and the talisman-laden Eighth, to name two that the St. Lawrence has recently committed to disc, can both take care of themselves. The Fifth is a little different — too long and too various to succeed on the notes alone. The St. Lawrence performance left me wondering what had sustained other performances I'd heard that somehow "worked." Objectively, nothing seemed wrong with this one beyond a strange mismatch between Nuttall's rather surfacey sound and the denser tone of his colleagues, but the piece seemed to wander without aim much of the time. One detail, tiny in itself, struck me as somehow symptomatic. In the opening of the Fifth the viola spends most of the first minute or so insisting on a particular five-note figure. Twenty minutes or so further on, the main part of the finale begins, with a jolly theme whose closing tag is those same five notes (plus two more). Nuttall played an E-natural here — twice — for what in every score I've seen is an E-flat, which wiped out the connection to the first movement. (Violist Lesley Robertson, when the theme came to her, played the E-flat.) Strange. It was in many ways an impressive performance, both in pure technical control and in long-term planning. The second movement's hideously exposed slow melodies, in octaves, were evidence enough of the former, and the first movement's relentlessly ratcheted-up development section proof of the latter. But it didn't, for me, quite make the piece work.
The Haydn, by contrast, emphatically "worked" — and that despite a performance that was, technically speaking, a good deal more scattershot than that of the Shostakovich. Add the St. Lawrence to the list of string quartets sufficiently serious about Haydn to dare have fun with it. Its Op. 77, No. 1, was full of delicate inflections, headstrong plunges, and (best of all) perfectly dippy touches that had no other motive than naked whimsy. In the last strain of the Menuetto da capo, Nuttall played one of a series of Gs as a natural harmonic high up the G string. Why? If you get Haydn at all, you have no need to ask. It was of a piece with the inevitable foot-stomping accompaniment to the same movement's Trio. My only reservation is that a good deal of the time Nuttall seemed to be sketching his passagework rather than actually playing it. As in the Shostakovich, this felt especially odd when the rest of the quartet was almost insolently solid. Sierra's Songs From the Diaspora is a piece, in the ugly but common phrase, "with legs." It's unfailingly attractive, beautifully orchestrated, and something almost any listener would want to hear again. Sierra's notes are a bit coy about the raw material. It's implied that the texts and at least some of the melodic material come from the displaced Sephardim, Jews expelled from the Iberian peninsula in the late 15th century. Sierra set seven Ladino texts on subjects as various as a tempting siren and a wicked mother-in-law. Grant Murphy entered into the characters with ferocious energy. (As the bride ranting about her mother-in-law, she sounded all too likely to storm off the stage and sink her teeth into the neck of the malefactress.) The accompaniment was beautiful, in the manner of new settings of Sephardic texts: shimmery, sparse, shot through with pointed melodic inflections. It would be difficult not to like it; it would be almost churlish not to like it. Is it necessary to add that I liked it?
(Michelle Dulak Thomson is a violinist and violist who has written about music for Strings, Stagebill, Early Music America, and The New York Times.)
|
